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It is almost time for Joomla 3.1 Beta and we wanted to give you a quick sneak-peek at the proposed new Tags feature to get you excited for it, which at this point looks like it will likely get in for Joomla 3.1 or at the latest for Joomla 3.2. Tags are a kind of meta-data that allow you to assign a keyword or keywords to a particular item. Since it's meta data, core and custom extensions could theoretically organize and display that meta-data in many different ways. For example, you might tag some contacts in Contact Manager as "Joomla Bug Squad" and do the same for some articles in Article Manager. You could then create a menu item (or use a module) to display, within a list, all the items tagged as "Joomla Bug Squad".

We also hope that this article will generate interest among extension developers and that you will consider budgeting some development time in the next few weeks to add tagging to your extensions. We feel this will be an important core feature that will add value to your extensions and provide an all-around tagging solution for users. The great news is that Tags is very easy to integrate into your extensions. Click here to find out how.

Some key features of the tags implementation:

It's easy to use

Tagging is integrated into all core components

Extensions developers can easily add tagging to their extensions

Tags are shared between extensions that implement tagging and across content types.

Tags are able to be nested. Each tag can have one parent tag and many children tags

There are currently a few layouts (with several options) and modules which you can use

Tags do not change the content that is tagged in regards to published state or ACL

"Multiple Categories" is #7 on the ideas.joomla.org site. This feature answers that request, albeit in a slightly different (and more flexible) way. For example, you can assign the same tag to different content types (which is not possible with categories) and then create blog views by tag.

If you'd like to help out with the Tags testing and/or implementation, please post a comment within the forum discussion and we'll be glad to help you get started.